“Guide?” Marson said to him. “You know where we go? Guide? Still guide?”
The face did not register understanding.
“Shit,” said Joyner.
Asch stared out into the dark, listening for movement.
“Angelo,” Marson said, trying to remember what little Italian he had learned from Mario, those months ago—it felt like years—in Palermo. “Perso? Lost? Are we lost?”
“Near,” the old man said, nodding in the direction of the field.
“He doesn’t know where he is any more than we do,” Joyner said. “He’d’ve said anything to save himself. He thought we were gonna shoot him. We’re fucked.”
“I wish you’d can it for good,” Asch said.
“Yeah, let’s just bury our heads in the snow. Operation Avalanche, remember? And here we are. Buried in the fuck’n snow.” Operation Avalanche had been the name for the landing at Salerno.
“Both of you shut up,” Marson told them. “Just shut up!”
“I say we head back down to the road. While we can still find the road.”
“Near,” said Angelo.
“Yeah,” Joyner said. “Near. Near what?”
“Non capisco.”
“Yeah, no capeesh.”
“I’m ordering you,” Corporal Marson said.
They put some more pieces of wood on the fire. The flames rose higher, and the heat grew momentarily more intense. Asch moved into the circle and put his hands close, and Joyner turned his weapon on the field, where the snow had begun to let up. Above them, an opening began in the clouds, a thinning of the curtain. Something of the moonlight shone through.
FIFTEEN
THE DIFFICULTY BETWEEN Marson and Joyner had begun in Palermo. Joyner had been too worried about regulations, and he did not like the use of wine. His people had been very concerned with temperance. None of them drank, not even beer. He’d had trouble with stomach ulcers when in high school, and his mother had had them her whole life. He played in the poker games, but he neither smoked nor drank, and Marson did both, as did Asch and the others. Joyner’s fund of curses and obscenities seemed inconsistent with such attitudes, but he did not see the irony. The language he used in daily talk was exclusive of his beliefs about behaviors regarding alcohol and tobacco. Mario, attuned to every nuance between the soldiers, realized this and began looking for ways to needle Joyner with the wine. He would offer it to him every time he picked up the bottle to pour more for Marson or Asch or one of the others. Joyner tried to ignore him, but you could see that it was getting to him.
“Oh, yes. Signor Joyner does not drink,” Mario would say, as if he had to remember it all over, each time.
During the landing drills, when they were put together in the landing craft, and Joyner would spill a stream of his obscenities, Marson would repeat Mario’s phrase exactly, with exactly Mario’s faintly chiding tone.
They were both buck privates then. Raw, fearful, and antagonistic.
Marson’s ability to tell stories was a source of aggravation to Joyner, who liked to think he was good at it. It seemed to others that Marson had led a more interesting life, and of course he was older. Marson’s time in boot camp included episodes of wild stupidity by a big brutal boy from Texas, named Wagoner, who got drunk every day somehow and deserved everything that his stupidity brought him. Marson had told a story about how Wagoner, after being stripped of his rank because of a fight he had picked at a saloon on the perimeter of the base, came to Marson and asked what he should do about the darker place on his sleeve, where the one stripe used to be. Marson, who had Wagoner’s trust because he was a storyteller and because the stories commanded the attention of others, told him to go to the supply shack and get some stencil letters and print DISREGARD on the sleeves. Wagoner had done so and had walked around the camp that way, through most of an afternoon, until a sergeant finally noticed it and chewed him out for not being in uniform.
Marson went on: “The DI would scream at the guy, ‘Damn it Wagoner, don’t you know we’re at war?’ And Wagoner would say, ‘You know it, Sergeant, and boy I sure hope we win.’ He had a sweat of booze on him every single morning and I swear I don’t know where he got his hands on it.”
“You don’t know where I get the wine,” Mario said. “But I am never mean or dumb.”
“You bring it back, Mario, my friend. This guy drank it all. He never gave anything to anyone except a black eye or a busted lip.”
Mario liked the story about the stripe and the stencil so much that he had the word DISREGARD scrawled on the sleeves of his T-shirts, and he was always after Marson to tell more Wagoner stories. Wagoner being carried asleep in his bunk out of a barracks and onto the gravel walkway that ran down the center of the camp. Wagoner getting drunk on Aqua Velva and passing out in the chow line. Wagoner curling up with his blanket roll so he could sleep better while on guard duty during war games. That was what finally got him washed out of the service, unfit for duty.
“Unfit for duty,” Joyner said. “Smell that one.”
The word washout became a favorite expression of Mario’s, and he took to calling Joyner that, whenever Joyner would turn down yet another offer of wine.
“More wine, Signor Joyner?”
“I’m not even gonna answer you.”
“Ah, a washout, then,” Mario would say. Clearly, he was Marson’s friend. And when orders came down and they were all gearing up for what they knew would be an amphibious landing somewhere on the mainland, Joyner came to Marson and said, “Your Guinea pal has got something for you.”
“Wish I could take it with me,” Marson told him. “Call him Guinea again and I’ll fix your smile for you permanently.”
“You can try to,” Joyner said.
They were standing in the middle of the camp, which was being dismantled. They stood very close, and neither of them moved for a few seconds.
“Maybe you should save your anger for the Jerries and the Wops,” Joyner said.
“Oh, I’m not angry,” said Marson. “I’m just definite.”
“Well, let’s see how definite you are in ten minutes.”
All around them, men were putting things into duffel bags and packs. It was a little frantic. This would be an enormous transporting of men and supplies, and they were going to be in the middle of the war and they knew it. They knew that a lot of them would be dead soon. The pall of that knowledge colored everything and made the sunny breezes from the sea seem dimly wrong even as they also felt unbearably precious.
“Your boy has something for you,” Joyner went on, “and I’m not talking about your fuck’n wine.” He pointed up the row of tents being dismantled. There was Mario, with a small boy and a man. The man had his arm around Mario’s shoulder. All three of them were being prevented from entering the bivouac. Marson walked over to them.
“Signor Mar-sone.” Mario smiled brightly with his missing tooth. “This is my father. Giuseppe.”
Giuseppe was squarely built, bulky through the shoulders, with muscular arms and big, rough-looking hands. His face was large featured—a wide nose and round, heavy-lidded eyes, and a black hairline that came to the middle of his forehead. He said something to Marson in Italian, glanced at Mario, and then back at Marson. “Per favore,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Marson told him. “Non parlo italiano.”
“This is my father,” Mario said. “He’s embarrassed by his English, so he speaks Italian to you.” He made a motion as if to present the little boy, pushing the boy’s skinny shoulders so that he stepped forward. The boy was even darker than Mario, sullen seeming, with a little purple scar the shape of a fishhook above the left eye. “My father wishes you to take my brother with you to America,” Mario said.
Marson looked at him, and then at the boy, who was staring at his own small hands folded in front.
“Per favore,” said the man. “Per favore.”
“I—” Marson began.
“I know you can’t take two of us. An
d my brother has never seen America.” A light shone in Mario’s eyes—a kind of sorrowful humiliation, a regret, and something of pride and anger, too. “You must take him for the wine, Signor Mar-sone.”
“Wait. Lord. Look,” Marson said. “You think we’re—”
“Il Duce will not last,” Mario said. “Italy will surrender. It is over. Will you do it?”
“But I’m not going to America.” Marson felt anger and tried to suppress it. “I wish I was. Look, Mario, I’m probably going to be dead tomorrow. We’re all probably going to be dead. We’re not—we’re headed to the mainland. The invasion. Tell your father. It’s an invasion. We’re not going home. We’re going to the war.”
The man said something else in Italian, then turned to Marson. “La mia famiglia. Family.”
“I understand,” said Marson. “My family’s five thousand miles away.”
The man stared.
“Capisco,” Marson said.
“Sì. Come voi, amo la mia famiglia.”
“Like you,” Mario translated. “He loves his family.” The look in his eyes was almost ferocious.
“I do understand,” Marson said. “I wish I could help.”
Mario muttered something in the other language to his father, who appeared confused for a moment, but then, quite slowly, showed the resignation of a man used to things turning out badly. With a sorrowful nod of his head he took the little boy by the hand and turned with him.
“I sell the wine,” Mario said. “To the others I sell it.”
“Yes.”
“You, because of the hole in your smile. I get you the best.”
“I know. I wish I could do something more.” Marson had twenty dollars of overseas scrip in his pocket. He reached in and brought it out, a ten and two fives. He handed Mario the ten and one of the fives.
The boy glared at him, but took it.
“It’s all I’ve got.” Marson offered him the other five.
“You are a friend,” Mario said. “Serious.” And he walked away.
Marson watched him go. There was confusion and noise all around him, planes going over, and men shouting back and forth about the hell they were all headed to. It sounded like a lot of boys excited about going to a football game, until you heard the controlled desperation in it.
Joyner had come partway to the end of the row of tents, and he stood waiting. “You see what your goddamn wine drinking got you,” he said.
Later, on the troopship headed for Salerno, news came through on the radio that the Italians were out of the war. Mussolini had been deposed. Everyone celebrated, and Marson had the thought that the mainland might be the same as it had been at Palermo. For some reason this gave him a terrible pang of missing home, of some kind of waste. The feeling surprised and alarmed him, and he looked out at the rise and fall of the sea, its little churning whitecaps, and was amazed at his own mind. Joyner came up to him and said, “We might actually miss this fuck’n war.” He smiled and patted Marson on the shoulder, turning to gaze at the sea and sky with him. Asch walked over and offered Marson a cigarette. “Lucky Strike,” he said. “Good name for a cigarette.”
“That actually smells good,” said Joyner. “You guys make me wish I smoked.”
“You want one?” Asch said.
“Hell, sure—why not?”
Asch lighted it for him. He drew on it and did not cough. He kept the smoke in for a long time. When he let go of it the cough came, and the other two pounded his back and helped him through it.
“How do you guys stand it?” Joyner said, still coughing.
“You get used to it,” Asch said. “Takes work. I’ve been practicing to get better at it most of my life.” He drew on his own cigarette and blew the smoke. Joyner tried it again and coughed less this time.
“It hurts my pipes, though.”
“Maybe you should go easy the first time,” Marson told him.
“Naw, I’ll finish it.”
They watched him smoke. He was getting the hang of it. He looked at Marson. “How much scrip did you give Mario?”
“All I had.”
“You’re gonna wish you’d kept some of it when we get to the mainland.”
“It’s only money,” Asch said.
“That’s kind of an unusual thing—” Joyner stopped. “Yeah, right. It’s only money. Fuck it.”
Asch shook his head, but smiled. There were cheers going up all over the ship.
They smoked their cigarettes and then tossed the butts over the side. In the happy feeling of the day’s news, Marson stood between them and put his arms across their shoulders. Looking out at the red sun going down over the slow, ponderous agitation of the Mediterranean, he forgot all the tensions and slights and irritations of the last few weeks and felt as if these two were, after all, the best friends a man could have.
SIXTEEN
CROUCHED CLOSE TO THE FIRE, in the woods beyond the snowfield, Corporal Marson thought of the futility of money, and then he was thinking of the futility of everything. He tried to pray, and the words went off from him, as if addressed to the wind and the silence all around. Joyner had opened a can of vegetable hash and was heating it in the flames. He wolfed it down, someone filling a little hole, tasting nothing.
The old man watched him and then, seeing Marson’s quiet gaze, looked down.
“Food?” Marson said. “Mangiare?”
The old man shook his head and smiled thinly. Marson wondered what he might be like, sitting at a table with people around it, and wine, and a peaceful countryside out the windows of a room. A warm countryside. He imagined it, the green grass in the gold light of an evening’s sinking sun. And then he moved closer to the fire, shuddering. Joyner had finished with his rations and he tossed the empty can off into the snow, like a grenade, the same motion of the arm.
“I could be a father right now,” Asch said suddenly. “That seems like an insane thought to me.”
“You better quit thinking so much,” Joyner said to him, reaching under the sleeve of his field jacket and digging at his forearm.
Asch ignored him, still looking at Marson. “Can’t we call it, and go back down?”
“Asch wants to go back as much as I do,” Joyner said.
Marson turned to the old man. “Take us.”
“Non capisco.”
He gestured toward the clearing. “Near. Bring us near. We move near.”
“Oh, sì.”
He gathered his cloak about him and stood. The others followed suit. The wind had dropped now, and the last of the snow filtered down out of the opening sky. Corporal Marson saw a glitter in the farthest distance, just above the tree line. The North Star. It thrilled him. There were little places in the sky beyond the trees, where the clouds were parting, like the fingers of a giant hand, once clasped, now letting go.
They covered the smoldering fire with snow and trudged on, keeping to the trees, going around the field, another path the old man knew. He moved with the alacrity he had exhibited in the first hour of the journey. On the far side, the ground dipped for a few yards and then rose sharply again, and again they were climbing. But it was just the cold now, and the snow that had already fallen. They saw no tracks, no signs of life anywhere, until they reached another clearing, a small white level span of ground, leading to another tree line and more of the steep climb. In that clearing, standing quite still, was a large buck deer, with a prodigious rack of antlers ranged above its head. It was looking right at them, white breast jutting from just below the neck, its breath showing in frosty vanishing plumes from its black muzzle. The eyes were black, blank, staring. Marson felt eerily as if it had been sent by the doe they had seen earlier, to evaluate what sort of threat they were to the forest. It turned, so slowly as to seem gradual, then stepped away, thin legs looking almost spindly, the massive tawny-black shape adorned by the high white tail, moving off. It came to a large windfall, the trunk of a fallen tree, and leapt over it with swift ease, as though its containment in gravity
were only provisional.
“Jesus Christ,” Asch said.
They watched it go up through the trees, in the next level of this mountain they were climbing.
“There’s no end,” said Joyner, sounding as though he had wept the words out.
They came to the ascending ground and began climbing again, following the old man. There were tree shadows now, and Marson realized that the moon was high, and it had cleared the clouds in the lower quadrant of the sky. A clear night. The air was colder than it had been all day. It stung his bronchial tubes, yet he drew it in, felt the purity of it, the new, dry, clear air.
They were climbing. It was rote again, their thighs burning, the ground treacherous and shifting beneath them. For a time, the men followed the tracks of the deer, going off up the incline, but then the tracks wound through the trunks of the trees and disappeared.
“I’ve gotta shit,” Joyner said suddenly. “Goddamn it.”
They stopped. He went a few feet into the moon shade and took care of it, cursing. Angelo made a sound under his breath. There was no telling if it was a word or merely a grunt.
“Goddamn it,” Joyner said, off in the near distance. The noise of what he was doing went off from him and carried over the stillness.
Asch made a little snorting sound, a muffled laugh. “He’s louder than a tank.”
“Il suo culo congelerà,” the old man said.
“Congelerà. What the hell is that?”
“Freddo. Ice. Freeze-uh.” The old man made a motion of being cold, arms wrapped around himself.
“Freeze-uh his ass, right?” Asch laughed. “Ass?”
“Culo. Sì. Freeze-uh his ass.”
“Freeze-uh his culo, that’s right.” He kept laughing.
Joyner took care of himself as best he could with fingers that had grown numb and paper from his pack that was damp and cold. He cursed and sputtered.
They went on a little and then stopped to wait for him. The wind had died down, and there were very few clouds now. Joyner had finished and commenced getting himself together again, still cursing. From this distance, he sounded like a complaining little boy. He trudged up to them without making eye contact.
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